50 km and a bucketful of joy later--

It’s gonna be a long one, so hold onto your hats.

Occasionally I have what can be considered the best possible sort of travel experience: the sort where you read about it in a guidebook, you go there, and then can’t decide whether to tell the whole world about the spot, call the Rough Guide and tell them to play it up, or savor it and keep it oh-so-secret. Talk about it only with your favorite people, in the hopes that it will remain exactly as you left it—unmarred by the push and pull of the conflicting pressures of development, of money, and of time and modernization themselves. Call me selfish, miserly, conservative.

In the Fall of 2005 I discovered the Santuario do Caraça in the mountains of Minas Gerais. I was traveling alone for two months as part of my master’s research (a rather peripheral part…), and needed to come to Belo Horizonte to meet with Britaldo. I planned a trip to Caraça, because it seemed like the kind of place that just might strike my fancy. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had come from the far western part of Brazil, the state of Acre, where the countryside was literally up in flames during the drought of 2005. My throat was itching, my sinuses screaming, and my lungs were thanking me profusely when I arrived in Minas Gerais. By the time I got to Caraça, I was thinking I might truly have arrived at the gates of heaven or somewhere equally pleasant.

Disbelief pretty much summed up my first trip to Caraça. From the summiting of a peak with João (who has been guiding in the mountains of M.G. for 35 years) to hiking with Lucia (who reminded me a little bit of my mother when I was alone in a foreign land), the only thing that lacking from my first trip was photo-documentation. My camera was lifted from my room in a cheap hostel a week or two later during a stay in Belém.

Photo-documentation will not be lacking from this account.

So, to sum up the history in a way that does not do it justice, Caraça was, for hundreds of years, a school run by an order of the Catholic church.

(Sidenote: I did also want to be a monk for a while as a child. Monks did all the cool things—chanted, gardened, got to live near cloisters. My parents tried delicately to tell me that women could not be monks and probably also noted that I was lacking in the self-discipline necessary to be any kind of devout religious individual, let alone one of the wrong gender. So maybe this could account for some of the appeal of Caraça for me—all the pluses of cloisters and mountains with none of the implications for personal self discipline.)

Moving on…there was later a fire in the school, and at some time after that, the area was turned into a Sanctuary and private reserve with a working hotel of sorts. It continues to be an active Parrish. Forgive my lack of the correct Catholic terminology here, somebody (Laura? Antonio?) leave me a comment to alert me of my slipups. The park itself is not enormous (10000 ha or so), but has areas of Mata Atlantica (atlantic forest), successional pasture, and great mountains and waterfalls! There is a particular type of wolf that lives in the park, the Lobo Guará, and who has become somewhat habituated to being fed on the church steps every evening. Aside from the rather sketchy ecological implications of this, it is kind of a neat thing to see. And fun to sit around with everyone in the evenings waiting for her (in this case) to show up.

Ok. So, to sum up: My first trip was so amazing, that I needed to go back.

I arrived at Caraça in time for lunch on Friday. Contemplating whether to be solitary, or outgoing. No choice—Caraça seems to attract people seeking solitude, but friendly ones. I gravitated towards some young-looking people who I had seen arrive with mountain bikes at lunch, and by the time we were done with our first plate of food, we had decided we were going to do a peak on Saturday. João the guide shows up (who rocks my world) and says he will take us to the Pico do Inficionado on Sat. Right on!

I decided to go to the Cascatona (literally, the big waterfall) on Friday afternoon, and my newly befriended mountain bikers (Anita, Marcelo and Dinei) headed out to get some biking in. This, my friends, is the Cascatona:

It is pretty darn big. And, get this: I was the only person there. The only person on the trail, the only person at the waterfall. My friends in wilderness recreation know that, if I were taking their surveys, solitude would be an important part of my wilderness experience. And, along with my love for solitude, comes a love for skinny-dipping in waterfalls. Here I am, ¼ of the way to being completely solitudinous and naked.

There was also a beautiful little shrine that I discovered on the hill near the Cascatona.

Friday night we drank a bottle of wine and saw the wolf. Pretty sweet.

Saturday morning was looking foggy but beautiful--we toasted our breakfast sandwiches on an enormous wood-fired cast iron cooking stove, and talked about the plan with João. Nine o'clock and we were on our way--the first four km or so of the hike were through the valley.

Anita is a photographer, and we quickly discovered that this meant it was not to be a rushed sort of expedition. I like tough, outdoorsy people that don't rush.

We drank from streams, and stopped at every photo opportunity. The flowers that grow at elevation in Brazil are spectacular, which you might have also noted in the trip report from Britaldo's fazenda.

These guys really don't smell at all, but I could not resist sticking my face in them.

Somewhere between kms 4 and 6, our stroll turned to bouldering. Probably 2 km of that, and then it got slightly more manageable. Here we are, running for the timer:

We ate lunch on the peak, and then went to check out the largest quartzite cave in the world. We went about 50 m into the entrance--enough to let me know that I want to go back again--just to cave!



We were the definition of 'beat' by the time we got back for dinner. Despite this, Marcelo and Dinei made it up to mountain bike this morning, and I set out for a hike pretty early in the rain. We crossed paths in Campo de Fora...they were moving faster than I was.

I was drenched and grinning when I made it back for lunch, and we all traded email addresses and plotted our picture exchanges. João gave me lots of lift-off-the-ground hugs, and I promised him multiple times I would come back for another peak. Nothing like a weekend of good people, good food, mountains, and being battered by the elements.

Dinei saved me a taxi ride back to Santa Barbara, and I am stiff and sore and ready for a hot shower, in Belo Horizonte.









Hope this made up for my lack of postings, and that you now are wanting to go to Caraça. Note that I'm only telling you about it because I like all of you...

Shhhh. Just promise to keep it our little secret.